Why Rishi Sunak’s model for spending freely is about to come to an abrupt end

This winter, the chancellor will have to go back to the tight-fisted, bean-counting approach of his predecessor, writes Andrew Woodcock

The chancellor talks with staff as he visits a Jobcentre Plus in Barking, east London (AFP via Getty)

It used to be that you knew what to expect from chancellors of the exchequer. Chancellors were the dry-as-dust “numbers men” in the government, fingers clenched tight around the purse-strings, eyes firmly on the bottom line, never happier than when they were saying “no” to excitable colleagues wanting to splash taxpayers’ cash on expensive plans.

But Rishi Sunak has turned this stereotype on its head, spending his first year in office as the man with bottomless pockets, handing out money left, right and centre.

From the Budget in March to his Plan For Jobs in July, his Eat Out to Help Out campaign in the summer, his Winter Economy Plan in September and Thursday’s £13bn boost for businesses hit by local lockdowns, the chancellor has racked up well over £200bn in unprecedented spending to prop up the Covid-wracked economy.

In doing so, he has soared to the top of polls as voters’ favourite cabinet minister and the man who most people trust to deal with the pandemic.

But the flurry of handouts has also started raising questions about whether the chancellor is the master of events or their slave.

Since announcing on 24 September that the state would pay 22 per cent of wages for unworked hours of staff unable to go full time because of Covid, he has had to adapt his Job Support Scheme twice – first increasing support to 67 per cent for businesses forced to close in tier 3 areas and now cutting tier 2 employers’ contributions to just 5 per cent, in the hope of persuading them not to lay workers off.

Coronavirus has forced him to abandon his planned November Budget and downgrade the three-year spending review in which he had hoped to set out lavish plans for infrastructure to deliver on Boris Johnson’s promise to “level up” disadvantaged parts of the country.

With his furlough system morphing into the much less generous Job Support Scheme at the end of next week, Mr Sunak will soon be facing a grim winter of job losses and business closures with massive debts to repay and without even the promise of Mr Johnson’s fabled “sunlit uplands” to offer voters. Ironically, Covid has made the nattily dressed 40-year-old popular by forcing him to stop acting like a chancellor. As the virus recedes, he will have to go back to the tight-fisted, bean-counting model of his predecessors, losing his appeal to voters the more he behaves like a traditional Treasury chief.

Yours, 

Andrew Woodcock

Political editor